Playing your opponents

It is very hard to master and requires a lot of practice to get it right, but once mastered, it should provide a great amount of leverage vs other players when you are running card dead or hit a bad run.

Every player can win when they get dealt 5x pocket Aces every hour, or flop sets in abundance; the simple fact is if you are running good it does not matter if you are an amateur or professional, you should win! Unfortunately as much as we pray for it, we won’t always run like the mighty Jesus and there will be times when we can play days of solid poker without scoring anything more than one pair on the flop.

When you do hit one of these spell (which is an inevitability for all players) it is very important to take your hole cards out of consideration and instead concentrate on pouncing on other players weaknesses. No-one proved the importance of playing your opponents more than Norwegian Annette Obrestad. She once famously won an online tournament without once looking at her hole cards. How did she do this? Simple, she put pressure on the players around her.

Showdowns are rare

If you run a poker tracking software to analyse your play, you will soon see that a vast majority of your hands are won or lost without a showdown, this means the pot is not being sent to the player with the actual best hand, but the player who looks like he has the best hand.

Under the gun in a 6 handed cash game at 5/10 to $30, the button raises to $90, and I make it $260. Now he may well fold something like AQ, as it is highly probable that I have him dominated pre flop. However the fact is I could have AA, but then again similarly I could be making the same move with 72 off suit. Without seeing my cards the other player cannot be 100%.

As an exercise I often play cash games without looking at my cards, which is easy enough to do on PKR (as you can elect to hide your cards). Try imagining what cards the other players at the table have. If they are all limping pre-flop then you can often assume that unless they are trapping to check raise you with a monster, they are all fairly weak. Try raising to isolate one of these players, and more often than not they will give up to a continuation bet on the flop if they miss their set-mining hand etc. If they check then call your flop bet, they are usually still pretty weak, but maybe have connected with one bit of the board. If the turn then brings an Ace, or picture card and they check again you should bet again as it is very unlikely they will check call with overcards on the board. By betting it appears very likely that you have hit your Ace or picture card on the turn, and in most cases they will give up... All while you really haven’t looked once at your cards.

James 'james666' Sudworth is a part of the Team PKR Pro group of poker players who recently represented PKR at the 2009 WSOP. To find out more about him and to read more articles written by James, please click here

Read Part 2...